Lust: What Happened and How To Get It Back

There used to be lust in this life where the chase and the anticipation was half the cum.

The luring grins and gropes in the bar or the bath house steam room where your respective imaginations ran wild of what the two of you were about to do next to each other. Since AIDS reared its ugly head and made many guys understandably gun shy, and the web replaced eye-to-eye cruising and flesh-to-flesh sex, fucking around has become more like work than play where you’re ready to shove a time card in the guy’s ass instead of your dick, like you were punching in on a job rather than abandoning yourself to a world of sweat, spit and sperm.

Why? Because lust by its nature is of the moment, spontaneous, earthy, hormonal, and whenever something comes in the way of that, then that initial twitch in the dick is muffled, compromised, sidetracked and the fun factor goes out the window and often with it a hard-on you shouldn’t have to think about.

Walk into the typical gay bar on a Saturday night. Yea, there’s a lot of hot sweaty guys and a lot of nasty conversation, but how many people are pairing off and hitting the mattress? Where’s the cruising? We wait all week to hit the bar, then don’t look at or talk to any one except the same buds we talked to the week before. Or we’re staring at our i-phones GPSing or texting someone on Grind’r. How many of those clandestine connections we envy in the shadows or backrooms, guys kissing or groping one another’s asses or crotches, are pure theater, as if the guys were saying to one another, “we’re in a gay bar, we’re supposed to be doing this,” or “let’s put on a show so people think we’re hot,” rather than, “yea, man, I fucken want you!” Five minutes later, those two guys who you thought were going to do it right there on the bar have separated and are strutting the circuit all over again.

Or take underwear night at the Ramrod, Florida’s premier leather bar. You got some luscious fucken guys walking around practically naked and what are the guys on either side of Mr. Perfect Body doing? Fixating on his new bulge undies courtesy of International Male? Hell no – they’re looking down at their cellphones! (Maybe they’re discreetly snapping a pic of that bulge with their phone to j-o over later.)

At times, the lack of animal magnetism I’ve seen in the sex clubs and baths makes me wonder if guys go to these places to do laps rather than connect. Are they waiting for the Impossible Wet Dream? Afraid of rejection? In this life, you need the ego of an elastic band – nothing ventured, nothing gained. But whatever it is, the energy level, the edge is often missing, and you end up by 1 a.m., desperate to do it with anything that moves just to get your rocks off and out of there.

The web is even worse. You want him, you’re convinced he wants you, you’re getting all edged up just setting up the day and time, getting hard in the shower the day of, and then either he doesn’t show, doesn’t E or call you back, or comes up with one lame excuse after another, until the lust has evaporated and with it whatever animal magnetism attracted you to him or him to you. Instead of making it easier to connect, the web has actually given assholes the perfect medium to hide behind.

Again, as I’ve said before, is it because it’s all too out there – the skin and the sex – that we’ve become jaded and even a little bored by it all? Or are there too many of us who are social misfits that those of us who have had the misfortune of encountering them just can’t take being burned again? The result: anticipation is replaced by trepidation.

One thing I know for sure: this loss of lust in gay life has made many of us, even young guys, impotent. When you have to take a Viagra, or watch porn, or force your mind into some imaginary brothel while a hot guy is lying right next to you, all just to get and keep it hard, what’s the point?